


Purple Hearts, Tugging At Our Sleeve

by lammermoorian



Series: Ghosts That Linger [2]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Red vs. Blue, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22759420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lammermoorian/pseuds/lammermoorian
Summary: Ezra is going to get some answers, one way or another. (SWR/Red vs Blue fusion, specifically Project Freelancer)
Relationships: Ezra Bridger & Kanan Jarrus
Series: Ghosts That Linger [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1517519
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Purple Hearts, Tugging At Our Sleeve

**Author's Note:**

> just fyi, the scene that this is based off of is a MASSIVE SPOILER for red vs blue, so if you have an interest in rvb and want to remain relatively spoiler free... you shld probably watch that first. explanation at the end for those who need it

Ezra didn’t know how long he’d been waiting outside the medbay. There was a chrono inside, he knew, but fat load of good it did him now, since the medics refused to let him in, despite the fact that he was a semi-regular guest. “Then you should be very well aware of the rules,” one of the medics had informed him, his yellow lekku twitching in annoyance.

“But you’re letting Kanan in!” Ezra had tried. Unfortunately, that had been the exact right thing to say to piss him off even further--the medic had taken his shoulder none-too-gently and forcibly evicted him from the medical wing without so much as a word.

So here he was, parked out on one of the hard crates lining the hallway while he waited, his butt getting number and number as the day wore on. Thankfully, he was ignored for the most part, as various rebels made their way to and fro, barely sparing a glance for the little loiterer in their midst. He’d watched Zeb stomp back and forth several times now, carrying huge crates of weapons and supplies on his shoulder and keeping up a steady, unbridled flow of deep, growly whining, forced as he was into playing the part of a “damn gonk droid.” 

Just as it was getting dark, Kanan emerged from the medbay, dark shadows under his eyes made all the more prominent by the low lighting, but there was something approaching a smile on his face, too. “How are they?” Ezra asked.

“Dhara finally fell asleep,” Kanan said, stretching his shoulders with a barely audible  _ pop! _ that had Ezra wincing in sympathy. “Zare is resting too; they had a spare bed, so he’s going to stay with her tonight.”

Ezra nodded. “Good, that’s good.” He knew firsthand how hard it could be to sleep in there: medics trundled around at all hours, surgeons shouted back and forth through the thin walls, droids hummed and beeped and buzzed at random intervals. People cried, from pain or nightmares. Ezra would take Zeb’s smell over the suffocating medical wing any day. 

Snatches of memory floated up without his permission--real memories, his memories, for once--and he saw himself, curled up as tightly as his body would allow, strung taught and liable to snap at any second, fingers pulling at his hair, and Kanan’s hands on top of them, thumbs rubbing small circles over his knuckles. If Dhara was like him… well, he was glad that she had someone with her tonight.

He shifted from side to side, really feeling his bones pressing up against the supply crate as he chewed his lip. “Did, uh. Did-”

Kanan shook his head. “She hasn’t said much about what the Inquisitors might have done to her. It looks like a lot of the standard stuff, though: shock torture, sedation. That kind of thing.” That was… not really what Ezra wanted to know, but he didn’t really have a response either, so he just hummed, nodding the vaguest of all possible acknowledgements. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t care about how Dhara was feeling. It was just, you know, he had something else on his mind, something that Kanan knew had been dogging him for years at this point, and even as he rolled over the question on the tip of his tongue, he refrained, for once in his life, from blurting it out. It seemed--well, he thought it might be a little insensitive, asking if Kanan had interrogated her yet. They’d only had her for a handful of hours.

Ezra kicked his boots against the supply crate, muffled thuds sending little vibrations up and down his legs. Kanan gestured with a jerk of his head. “Let’s take a walk.”

Kanan led them through the haphazard maze of stations, supplies, droids, and fighters, dodging pilots and officers until the crowds began to thin out. “So,” Ezra said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his flight suit, trying for casual, missing by a parsec. “We get any good info from the raid?” Sabine had disappeared into her room as soon as they had all gotten back on board, arms loaded down with datapads and a wide-eyed, wild joy on her face, and he sort of wished he was with her right now, helping her comb through them for their secrets. 

“How have your nightmares been?” Kanan asked instead.

“My nightmares?” Didn’t really seem all that relevant right now, but whatever, he figured Kanan was probably just nursing a sudden parental streak after spending so much time with Dhara in the medbay. “Fine, I guess. The same. No more freaky visions, if that’s what you’re asking.” It clicked, suddenly, like a data stick in a terminal. This was it, the connection they had been hoping for--he could see the answers before him, a beacon through a nebula cloud. “Dhara has them, too?”

Kanan shook his head. “She doesn’t.”

“Wh-” Ezra tripped over a rock. What the  _ fuck _ ? “What? But I thought--”

“She’s JEDI-compatible, yes. And she has nightmares, just… not like that.”

The clouds came in again, thick and dark. “Well,” he stammers, grasping at the vanishing answers, “does she at least have any more evidence we can use?”

Without him realizing it, he had followed Kanan out beyond the edge of the base, into the rocky wilderness, flame-colored by sunset--and far away from prying ears. Kanan chewed at his lip, scratched at his neck beneath his nerftail, and sighed. “I don’t,” he paused, rolling his words over in his mouth, “I don’t think she had any more info the first place.”

Was this how Kanan felt all the time? About shit that never added up? If it was, Ezra was beginning to wonder how he kept a handle on his sanity, because Ezra felt like he was about to explode, a hot curl of anger building up in the pit of his stomach, enough pressure to make his hands shake. “What about the records we stole,” he asked, he begged, “do they have anything?”

Kanan shook his head, arms crossed. “The Academy wouldn’t have had any old JEDI files; the Inquisitorius is a different program.”

“You mean to tell me that we broke into an Imperial facility for nothing?” Distantly, he realized he was shouting. “Then what the hell did we do the raid for?!”

Kanan cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re mad that we rescued a kid from torture?”

Ezra blushed. “No, of course not!” Zare was a tough kid, stern, focused, with a grim set to his mouth that couldn’t be shaken, despite Ezra’s best efforts. The look on his face though, when they opened the door to Dhara’s cell, his misty eyes and trembling mouth that curved upwards into a shaky, disbelieving smile as Dhara reached out to him… Ezra was happy for his friends. He was. “But I thought we were only going because Dhara might be like me. Because she might have visions like I do!”

That had been the reasoning that had gotten them authorization offbase, though Kanan had had a tick in his jaw that Ezra knew meant he probably would have gone anyway, authorization or no authorization. But thank God Hera had been granted permission to lead the mission, because they would have been  _ fucked _ otherwise. 

The seven of them--Kana, Ezra, Zare, and Syndulla and the Spectres--had infiltrated the facility on Arkanis officially in order to steal as many Academy secrets as they could possibly get their hands on. Dhara had been the second, secret objective. As much as Ezra objected to being treated like a Rebel Alliance asset, the information that he could divine from thin air had proven to be extremely useful, over and over again, and the lure of a potential second psychic had been too strong for Sato to resist. Ezra’s visions had shown him things like locations of bases, identities of key Republic figures, and even some secrets of the semi-mystical JEDI program, and all at the low, low cost of a crippling migraine that kept him out of commission for at least three days. 

And it wasn’t like Sato enjoyed inadvertently causing him pain. He always came to Kanan, metaphorical hat in hand, and gravely asked permission to use his crewmate’s extraordinary abilities in order to assist the Rebel Alliance’s current operation, and Kanan would always glare, mouth twisted like he’d been sucking on a limon, before acquiescing, because they both knew Ezra would do it anyway, because for whatever reason, Ezra believed in the Rebellion wholeheartedly. This was a cause he could dedicate himself to, something beyond himself and his past and his weird powers, but despite just barely respecting his wish to be involved, Kanan could not have made his distaste for the Rebellion clearer. If it weren’t for Ezra’s special little talent, he knew Kanan would up and vanish in a heartbeat, taking Ezra with him far beyond the reach of the Republic or the Rebellion.

Even if he did have that weird thing going on with Captain Syndulla.

With a heavy, heavy sigh, Kanan dropped down on a flat boulder, tapping the stone beside him. Ezra stayed put, hands balled at his sides, and focused on not screaming at him. 

“At the end of the war,” said Kanan, after a while, “things didn't look good for the Republic. The Separatists were winning, barely, but they were still winning. For all of Valorum’s talk about swift victories and decisive action, he just couldn’t get a leg up on the droid armies, and that was even with the help of the JEDI.”

“Okay.” What was with the history lesson?

“I know your only frame of reference has been, well,” he grimaced, “me, but I’m not sure you understand just how good the JEDI agents were. We’re talking combat prodigies in every possible discipline: strategic geniuses, weapons experts, top of the top of the class in engineering and aviation. JEDI agents were more than just soldiers, they were… well, you’ve seen Ahsoka.”

Seen and nearly been decapitated by her. (Accidentally, of course.) But she was an absolute beast in a fight; a real one-woman army. And she hadn’t even completed JEDI training.

“Imagine twenty agents just like her--no, even better. And it  _ still  _ wasn’t enough to fight off the droid army.” Ezra saw again, in his memory, the metal wave that swept through Garel, the inexorable march of the killing machines that couldn’t be escaped, and he shivered, old blaster-fire ringing in his ears. “That was the state of the war. And that’s when the Director started to get into A.I. theory. He had the best agents, the best training, the best equipment, but they were still missing the edge they needed to get an edge over the Separatists. So, the Director thought, why not push them a step further?”

Ezra stared, dumbfounded. He tried to imagine Kanan or Ahsoka, already stellar fighters, their skills cranked up to eleven. His stomach twisted.

“The Director requested several A.I. for field use, but the approval process would have taken way too long. So he decided to… jump the gun. Bypass the ethics committees and take matters into his own hands.” He lifted his head, stern green eyes boring into him, like Ezra was a very interesting piece of security footage. “Do you know how A.I. are made, Ezra?”

“They’re based off of human minds, right?”

Kanan nodded. “And not just any human mind. You have to take a brain and copy it, neuron by neuron, but you need to use an actual genius, someone whose brain activity is comparable to that of a computer. There was only one person in the JEDI program who even remotely fit the bill.”

The name tumbled out of his mouth before he realized it, the dull throb in the back of his skull that heralded the start of a vision beginning to build. “Skywalker,” he breathed. 

A man appeared before him, in his mind’s eye, tall, sandy-haired, with a crooked half-smile, too far gone to be friendly, a dark figure standing before the oncoming onslaught of the droid armies. He saluted whoever was watching with his sword, before turning and throwing himself into the fray. 

“But wait,” Ezra said. The image vanished, leaving behind only the painful pulsing in his head. “They only made one? I thought you said all the JEDI agents had A.I.?”

Kanan’s stare pierced through him, intensity pouring out of him, nearly suffocating Ezra in it. “Exactly. The Director only ever made one. He only ever had the resources at his disposal to make one. One brain, one set of infrastructure, one chance without alerting the authorities. So he had to get creative. And he had an idea.”

A spike of ice lanced through his brain, burning a path through his skull. “He--”

_ Wind howled, a tsunami of sand, gritty and rasping, dragging across his face like long nails, leaving tracks in his skin, and there was a woman made of starlight, and she wept, in pain and sorrow and grief, for  _ him  _ and for herself, and she clutched her stomach as blood poured from her eyes-- _

“He--” The packed earth rose up to meet his knees, solid, unyielding. He squeezed his eyes shut against the bright light of the yellow sunset. Dimly, he heard Kanan scramble off the rock, felt hands propping up the body that threatened to topple over into the dirt. 

_ Padme! _ Screamed a voice in the hurricane.

“Ezra,” Kanan was whispering, “Ezra, I need you to focus. What did you see?” And what the  _ fuck _ , Kanan, couldn’t the guy let up a little while Ezra’s head was splitting open?

“I--” He winched around a sharp stab behind his eye, “There was a woman, and she--she was dying, over and over again, but it wasn’t--it wasn’t  _ real _ , it was--”

He was there again, in his mind, Skywalker, but he wasn’t fighting, he knelt before a two-way mirror with his hands over his ears, tears cascading down the bridge of his finely craftly nose and his full lips twisted, holding back a scream, and he flickered like a ghost, vanishing between the heartbeats that echoed in Ezra’s brain like war drums. 

“Kanan,” he panted, “what was that? He--the Director--”

“He split the A.I.,” Kanan said, grim like a eulogy. “The A.I.--Skywalker’s brain--”

Ezra gasped, half in pain. “It was tortured.”

“And just like a human mind under stress, it broke. It fractured itself to protect itself. Then the Director harvested those fragments.”

“The JEDI A.I.s,” he breathed, blinking tears out of his eyes, “they were--”

“Splintered pieces of a reverse-engineered multiple personality disorder. Skywalker’s mind, ripped up and doled out to the JEDI agents as needed: his creativity, his quick thinking, his confidence.” Kanan hesitated, searching Ezra’s gaze for… something. “His rage.”

That smile surfaced in his mind again. Skywalker grinned in his memory, teeth bared and bloody, and the face turned into Kanan’s. Ezra shook his head. “What,” he “what did they do to them?”

“Ezra--”

“The A.I.s, it--it made them crazy?”

The hands on Ezra’s shoulders clenched, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to ground him. “Not,” Kanan swallowed, “not everyone was able to--implantation is a difficult process. There’s so many factors that go into whether or not a person is A.I.-compatible: it requires a huge amount of neuroplasticity, and, well,” then he cast his glance down at the dirt, the shadows under his eyes suddenly stronger, deeper. “Some people handled it better than others.”

His temple throbbed, faces appearing before him like a flood, flashing lights and piercing screams, and he squeezed his eyes shut. 

“Skywalker, he--he was a genius, yes, but he had always been… intense. Different. He was angry, impulsive, prone to violence if that’s what was needed to get the job done. And then the Director, he took an already unstable mind and broke it down even further, and handed out the pieces like fucking candy. These were my friends, people I knew and loved, and just like that, they turned. They became faster, more efficient,  _ deadlier _ .”

Truthfully, Ezra was only half-listening at this point. He heard Kanan, yes, but more than that, he saw it, playing out in front of his closed eyes as if he had been dropped right in the middle. He sees the fighting in flashes and frames, men and women in white hospital gowns lining up like columns, faceless soldiers falling to the dirt, their weapons rolling from their hands, their eyes blank behind their visors.

“And with this stunning success,” Kanan said, “the Director cast a wider and wider net, pulling in anyone and everyone that he could prove had Separatist ties.”

This, too, Ezra saw: the nighttime raids, dark rooms, the tasers and needles and hammers, a vicious yellow grin that curled beneath streaks of red paint. He opened his eyes, hoping to clear his vision of the blood and spittle that threatened to drown him, and saw that Kanan’s eyes were lined with unshed tears.

“I don’t understand,” he whispered, throat scratchy, even though he couldn’t remember screaming. “I don’t--”

“The war dragged on,” said Kanan, softly, like he was pulling Ezra from any other nightmare. “Every day more and more people were fed up with Valorum for being unable to deliver on his promises. They were calling for his  _ head _ . And there was only one person they wanted that could step up and fill his shoes.”

“Chancellor Palpatine? But what does that have to do with--”

“The JEDI program was already falling apart. Vos died, Offee defected, Kenobi disappeared; agents were dropping left and right, and when the Director dissolved the program, there was a lot of data that had to go away. Illegal arrests, intimidation, torture, murder--he couldn’t risk having all that information lying around where anyone could find it.” He paused again, the hands on his shoulders squeezing rhythmically, gentle pulses to ground him. To ground them both. “So he hid it, in a place where no one would think to look.”

“At the Academy?” Ezra asked. But Dhara had been the true purpose of the raid, not the records, so why-- 

Kanan shook his head. “Too obvious. But it doesn’t matter--I know where it is.”

He--he knew where it-- “Then why are we here?!” Ezra shouted. “Why aren’t we out there looking for it?!” 

Those hands came up to cup his head, and Kanan brought him closer, their foreheads nearly touching. “Ezra,” he spoke, low and urgent and pleading, “I need you to listen to me. There’s a reason why the Inquisitors relocated you to a whole different planet. They could have just left you on Lothal, but they had to move you to a place where no one knew who you were, or would care that you were alone.” 

The memories--his own, no one else’s--rose up once more, but nothing could have torn his gaze away from Kanan’s in that moment. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there’s a reason you know so much about the JEDI. There’s a reason you have these nightmares.”

_ Sometimes, I--I have these dreams,  _ he had confessed to Kanan after one particularly hellish night, and the man had listened to him, but never tried to reassure him that they meant nothing.

“It’s how you were able to crack the security at the Academy so easily.”

_ How the hell did you do that?  _ Kanan had looked at him with shock and a little bit of grudging admiration, and Ezra had only shrugged.

“It’s how you knew I used to be a JEDI agent.” 

_ You were one of them, weren’t you?  _ He hadn’t even known why he had said it, he had just known it, deep in his bones, and Kanan’s naked shock had been all the confirmation he had needed.

“It’s how you knew that Tano was still alive.”

_ Malachor. She’s on Malachor. I know it.  _ Ezra had found her, when no one else could, based on nothing but a hunch, the name of a world that he had never heard of before. 

“Ezra, there’s no such thing as psychics.” His father’s smile, his mother’s headscarf, a sterile operating table, a sharp pain at the base of his skull that had never truly faded. “They hid the data cache in  _ you _ .” 

**Author's Note:**

> ezra was surgically implanted w an a.i. that had all this shady data when he was a little kid and then forcibly taken from his parents (who were killed to cover it up). he blocked out that traumatic event but all the info dumping in his head manifested as nightmares. the kid's a walking encyclopedia of jedi shit but he just doesn't realize it, and "psychic" is way easier to swallow than "unwitting carrier of proof of war crimes." why didn't palpatine just destroy the data cache, you say? drama, m'boy... the drama of it all...


End file.
